The spelling of an English word may reflect its part of speech, not just the sounds within it. In 2 preregistered experiments, we asked whether university students are sensitive to 1 effect of part of speech that has been observed by linguists: that content words (e.g., the noun "inn") must be spelled with at least 3 letters, whereas…

We investigated how university students select between alternative spellings of phonemes in written production by asking them to spell nonwords whose final consonants have extended spellings (e.g., ‹ff› for /f/) and simpler spellings (e.g., ‹f› for /f/). Participants' choices of spellings for the final consonant were influenced by whether they…

Many English phonemes have more than one possible spelling. People's choices among the options may be influenced by sublexical patterns, such as the identity of neighboring sounds within the word. However, little research has explored the possible role of lexical conditioning. Three experiments examined the potential effects of one such factor:…

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children's spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final "d" of words such as "salad"…

One influential theory of literacy development, the constructivist perspective, claims that young children believe that writing represents meaning directly and that the appearance of a written word should reflect characteristics of its referent. There has not been strong evidence supporting this idea, however. Circumventing several methodological…

Two studies examined children's use of letter-name spelling strategies when target phoneme sequences match letter names with different degrees of precision. We examined Portuguese-speaking preschoolers' use of "h" (which is named /a'ga/ but which never represents those sounds) when spelling words beginning with /ga/ or variants of /ga/. We also…

The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realized. Listeners detected…

Although English lacks 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, considering the context in which a phoneme occurs can often aid in selecting a spelling. For example, /a/ is typically spelled as a when it follows /w/, as in wand, but as o when it follows other consonants, as in pond. In 2 experiments, the authors asked whether children's…

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

Two studies examined young children's knowledge of letters' sounds and names and preschoolers' ability to learn various sound-letter mappings. Findings indicated that an important determinant of letter-sound knowledge is whether the sound occurs in the name of the letter, and its location. Children used knowledge of letters' names when learning…

The results of four experiments refute the idea that children rely heavily on their knowledge of letter names when they begin trying to spell words. Although kindergartners and first graders sometimes spelled the nonword /var/ as "vr," they were less likely to spell the nonword /ves/ as "vs" or the nonword /tib/ as…

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In…

Three studies examined linguistic factors influencing preschooler's phonemic awareness task performance. Results indicated no performance differences between fricatives and stops. Subjects were more likely to mistakenly judge that syllables began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme differed from the target only in voicing than when it…

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words.…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…